GIMP receives a $100K donation - <AUTHOR> https://www.gimp.org/news/2018/08/30/handshake-gnome-donation/ <comment><USER2> If everyone complaining about GIMP in this thread (and most clearly spend a lot of time using it, myself included) donated $20 or an hour of their time to GIMP, that'd be another $2k or ~100+ hours of time donated (as of this moment) to help make it better.

I have to run to work, so I just donated $20.

[https://www.gimp.org/donating/](https://www.gimp.org/donating/)

<comment><USER3> $20/hr for knows-wtf-they're-doing programmer time?

<comment><USER4> I make about $20 USD an hour doing low-level work writing performant C and x86 assembly at my current job.

Granted, it's not my only source of income, but what is the average pay/hour for most devs?

<comment><USER5> For those skills as a mid-tier seniority developer, not in Silicon Valley in the land of make-believe? Probably like $85k-110k.

If you live in SV it might be like $210k or something absurd.

<comment><USER6> So, about $50 an hour for non-SV developers?

<comment><USER7> Plus benefits. A contractor or consultant will charge more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My hope: whichever direction Gimp development goes, they should try doing something similar to Blender - where they bring a bunch of developers and artists into a space. While they're in that space (for a limited amount of time) work on some big project involving Gimp. Develop Gimp to suite that project's needs.

<comment><USER9> Blender has always been very project-focused, and you could even say it's really project-identified. That reflects a particular kind of psychological reward system working within the development team. GIMP developers have long demonstrated more of a GIMP-is-GIMP approach. This kind of approach looks at GIMP as a very unique thing--there's nothing else quite like it, and that's worth celebrating and understanding and working on. Users who get the most out of GIMP will learn GIMP and its leverage points, rather than discovering that GIMP works the way they do or "shows something big" to demonstrate that it is in sync with what makes something cool or interesting to others (the area of fitting the user's style, be it Maya or whatever, has become a Blender specialty since at least the last decade+).

So the broad decisions about what will be done and in what way have already been made at the team- and individual-psychology level, assuming this money doesn't radically change the core team composition. While the objective manifestation of the spending is yet to come, this money was already spent by the team psychology, and the further we depart from GIMP's past in wishing for changes, the less likely our wishes will match with the actual outcome of the expenditures.

And let's take the polar opposite into consideration--even if the idea of becoming more like Blender and gathering people and putting a big project together makes the GIMP team members recoil in horror, the most well-founded hope would be that the GIMP team builds on past successes and learns from past failures, or gains more momentum in the direction that will likely bring it the most success _given the team's psychological makeup & personal resources_. That would probably bring about a really good outcome even if it doesn't result in a highly-visible project.

<comment><USER10> So... I've had to read this about eight times, and two or three of those together with someone to figure this out... But what you're saying is "gimp developers work on gimp because they like gimp, while blender developers work on blender to see what people can do with it -- so they will not be able to spend this money effectively." \-- or am I still misunderstanding you?

<comment><USER9> (Of course it would be Boudewijn Rempt)--much respect to you and thank you for your question.

> gimp developers work on gimp because they like gimp

I'd say: GIMP has always been good enough for GIMP developers as its own world to explore--what is it, what can we make it become for the sake of GIMP. I remember the good old days (frankly I'm not sure if this still happens) when a mailing list suggestion like "look, Photoshop does X and GIMP sucks at X" would almost always result in a "hey, the source is open" comment from core devs. This drove some users absolutely crazy, because _if it was their project_, one of the core goals would be fitting the project to user expectations (probably rooted in Photoshop use-experiences) rather than setting a sort of psychological boundary around GIMP that is less permeable to that kind of encouragement to change for the sake of some externality like "a frustrated Photoshop pro" or "a mom who never knows where her toolbars go". There generally hasn't been a pressured response to that kind of pressure from the GIMP team except in slower, measured ways. This tells us that GIMP developers feel less pressure from that feedback (positive pressure or negative) than other developers on other projects might.

This kind of internally-protective outcome reminds me of a bumper sticker that I saw that said "Keep Portland Weird." I think there's a benefit to that line of thought. Maybe "Keep GIMP GIMP--while also working on meeting Photoshop- level expectations _whenever we feel like it_" is more representative. And this is completely separate from looking at GIMP as a low-quality project, or even a weird project. It's an awesome project _in its own way_ is what I'm saying. To understand it and its unique leverage points is to enjoy using GIMP.

> while blender developers work on blender to see what people can do with it

First, I don't know about individual developers, as this is more of a comment of "type and generality". But I think the project outcomes make it clear that Blender developers really enjoy the feeling of making a big impact in the world, and building bridges to the outside-of-Blender world, as opposed to more internal focus on bringing a special, unique thing into existence. (Every project will have a blend of both, but this is speaking in terms of project- type, where it helps to cast a project into one bucket or another in order to get at what makes them different.)

The former, a focus on the outside impact, results in something with which it's easy to objectively identify and praise, because it's more objectively "compatible" with more people and teams. A Maya team goes "we get this" partially because it works with them on a level. It crosses the objective barrier and works with people who prefer another set of keyboard shortcuts and window layouts. And so the Blender team gets more of that outside-in encouragement from a broader base, IMO.

And again, this doesn't make GIMP faulty, just different. The latter type of focus, the internal focus, asks "what do _we_ want to do, what interests _us_ as a team, what's next for _us_" and I believe that's always been a feature of GIMP's existence. When you understand GIMP you can talk to core developers. When you begin to push on it, and compare it to Photoshop, you become the problem much faster than you would in other communities, because you're not focused on what GIMP is. So the GIMP project might have this objective-world blind spot, as evidenced by a HN thread full of change requests :-) but it's a trade-off for a high level of internal, subjective quality which can be observed if you _look at GIMP for what it is_ and really figure it out. I mean, I use the software every day, and there are so many little things that make me miss it when I have to use something like PS.

> so they will not be able to spend this money effectively

Quite the opposite--I'm certain it will be spent effectively. No doubt about that at all.

What I'm saying is that it would probably not be realistic to hope that it is spent the exact same way that a Blender fan would really appreciate. And that's OK and even a good thing.

<comment><USER11> > The latter type of focus, the internal focus, asks "what do _we_ want to do, > what interests _us_ as a team, what's next for _us_" and I believe that's > always been a feature of GIMP's existence

Right now, the focus is on completing the GTK+3 port for v3.0 and making room in API for upcoming serious changes in v3.2 such as non-destructive editing. Sounds good enough? :)

<comment><USER9> I'm feeling quite spoiled here--updates coming straight to the rabble from the source. :-) And when I'm still catching up with new features from last year! Now this non-destructive editing thing, can it also cure someone who rasterizes all of his text layers without making backups? ;-) (Really it does sound awesome)

<comment><USER12> Perhaps. Nondestructive editing tends to preserve the original image and applies edits to a copy. It _could_ do that in a way that makes that possible, but it's likely someone would need to specifically build the capacity to remember text layers like that.

A naive implementation might just have two buffers and a list of pixel changesets and no knowledge of how the changes were made. A more advanced implementation could track more information, work on a per layer basis, and support the recovery of vector text layers from rastered ones.

So I guess the answer is not by default, but it opens the door for it to be a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great, I hope Gimp puts it to good use. I would love for Gimp to focus more on artistic uses instead of only on software types (which is probably a vain hope).

We would _greatly_ benefit from a good _artistic /photo_ image editing tool that does not belong to the Adobe's subscription license racket. Unfortunately, Gimp is not nearly in the same class as Photoshop, so most artists grumble about Adobe but still pay subscription because its UI is _SO_ much better. Photoshop is the main reason I still run Windows at home; I would gladly donate this money to Gimp instead if it provides the same functionality: good slider and visual coordination to find the right levels and color balances, good color support (no, 8-bit color is not enough), decent printing (at least to 17"x40") and raw camera images.

<comment><USER14> Have you tried Affinity Photo/Designer?

<comment><USER13> Thank you, I will take a look, it looks interesting and seems to be getting positive reviews from photographers.

<comment><USER15> I've been using it for about 18 months, works very well for my modest needs (stitching panoramas, HDR stacking, occasionally removing an unwanted person or thing from a photo). Most of the shortcuts and much of the interface is just like Ps, even to the point where many Ps tutorials/techniques just work.

The one area where I'd say it needs improvement is the raw development. The output just isn't that great compared to Adobe Camera Raw or (my tool of choice) Capture One.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Create news, hope GIMP can use that money to work out a better and intuitive design.

For example, currently, many Filters don't have previews (Or the preview window is too small), which make apply them become a slow try and error game.

Also, the Text in the picture can be hard to select, as sometime you mistakenly select the underlying layer instead of the text.

Also again, Filters cannot be directly applied to editable text. Sure, GIMP will convert the rasterized text back to editable text, but doing so will discard all the applied Filters.

<comment><USER17> You can always submit bugs/annoyances/requests directly to the GIMP developers: [https://www.gimp.org/bugs/](https://www.gimp.org/bugs/)

<comment><USER18> It looks like the GIMP developers would rather that new feature requests be made on their mailing list before making a new bug:

"An enhancement request should never be filed without prior discussion on the gimp-developer mailing list[0]. This is to make sure that the enhancement requests that are filed are well-specified and aligned with the overall goals the developers have for GIMP."

But please don't let that stop you! The more feedback that the developers get, the better GIMP will be for everyone.

[0]: [https://www.gimp.org/mail_lists.html](https://www.gimp.org/mail_lists.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Please give us non-destructive adjustment layers!

Please!

Been waiting for this for years.

On every new Gimp release I look through the new features and ... no. No adjustment layers.

I'm confused how this is not the #1 priority. It has been what I am missing for years and years. And every time I talk to someone about Gimp vs Photoshop, they ask me 'Do you still have to cope with destructive adjustment curves and filters etc? OMG, that is archaic!'.

<comment><USER20> I've used GIMP for years but I have no idea what you're talking about. Perhaps it's not the #1 priority because you're one of a small percentage of people who need it?

While I'm not someone who needs image editing professionally or who makes amazing things with it, I did take my time to learn GIMP properly for my use- cases, and the things I find lacking do not include "non-destructive adjustment layers".

<comment><USER21> It's one of those features that once you notice in Photoshop, you lament the lack in GIMP.

The gist of it is that all your filters, color corrections are just additional layers, w/o manipulating the image in the layer under them. It lets you very quickly toggle between different settings, revise settings, and even very easily only filter _parts_ of an image. (ie, you can have a unfiltered layer above a stack of filters, and the original image)

<comment><USER20> How is this different from duplicating the layer (Ctrl+Shift+D for quick usage) and then applying the filter? It's two more manual steps (one hotkey to duplicate, and another action later to delete the old layer) but it doesn't sound like something currently impossible in GIMP.

<comment><USER22> Simple answer is that those bitching about lack of features want GIMP to provide exact same features as Photoshop with exact same workflow.

I wonder if these same people also bitch about learning new languages or frameworks when technology moves on.

<comment><USER20> What I wonder is if they try to work on the features they claim to want so desperately (number one priority!) for _years_. But there probably isn't a lot of overlap between people who need gimp to be like professional alternatives and people who can decently code. In our IT study we had four major tracks and the people doing media design were notoriously bad at coding anything beyond HTML, and even that was considered difficult by most of them (the three other tracks were software, embedded software, and business -- the latter also infamous for the same reason).

<comment><USER22> That's true, but my comment was more about the HN crowd which is primarily (or exclusively) from programming background.

Professionals will always go with a well-marketed and popular option and they don't care about paying 500-1000$ for an image editing program. They don't care (or know) about open source. But I expect better from HN crowd.

As for GIMP and its features, well, when Photoshop firdt mentioned about the new Content Aware feature, there was a collective orgasm, but GIMP had that feature (by sheer virtue of the scriptability and flexibility which is inherent in its design) in a script format at least a year or two before that.

I don't expect GIMP to win hearts of professionals and their shiny macbooks, but for a casual heavy job, GIMP is more than capable, and expect programmers to appreciate it for what the GIMP project has achieved. But all we get here is "but but Photoshop!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

<comment><USER24> I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's _this_ hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

<comment><USER25> What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features?

GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking:

1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands

2) floating-point pixel values

3) complex-valued pixels and their natural operations

4) images of arbitrary size, without need to open the whole image at once (which may not actually fit in memory)

5) save the processing graph and apply it to other images with a command line tool

<comment><USER26> > What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI?

Where do I start?

      - sometimes when I start it it doesn't display toolbox
      - when I open the toolbox it is (sometimes) a vertical line of buttons (single column) instead of 5 columns that I begged it countless times to be
      - setting the size of pencil is completely unintuitive - I usually click in what appears to be input field, only to discover it is not (but instead some meter that sets size to some huge number)
      - saving the set size is something that should be done automatically, but I haven't found a convenient way to do it

And that is even without mentioning the whole Save / Export fiasco.

Note that I love Gimp and use it often, but UX is not its strong point.

<comment><USER27> > setting the size of pencil is completely unintuitive - I usually click in > what appears to be input field, only to discover it is not (but instead some > meter that sets size to some huge number)

It actually is an input field, but it can be interacted with in 3 ways. Clicking on the value focuses it, and allows editing by keyboard. Clicking and dragging in the bottom half of the block allows you to increase or decrease the value by dragging left or right, and the movements you make translate to relatively smaller value changes, so you can be relatively precise. Clicking and dragging in the top half of the block allows you to select a specific value by dragging, and the position of the cursor translates directly to the position of that value on the bar.

<comment><USER28> I just tried it. If you click in the top half the value immediately changes, no dragging required. It is really annoying.

<comment><USER29> I find that really useful

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Buried lede here is this Handshake.org thing. Anybody have any idea about what this is?

<comment><USER31> Most importantly, where do they get $400K

<comment><USER32> They did an ICO. Just like every companies with written "decentralized" in the baseline.

<comment><USER31> Well, I guess in the universe of scams, this isn't the worst outcome.

<comment><USER33> > The Handshake project has received 10.2MM USD from Project Sponsors. The net > proceeds are pledged to be distributed to Free and Open Source Software > communities (projects, non-profits, hackerspaces).

Holy jumping jesus, this is the best scam I have ever _SEEN!_ They've scammed a bunch of VCs into investing in their ICO, and they're now going to give the money to FOSS projects with no obligation! This project of course is doomed, but this is a great way to infuse cash into FOSS without having to actually ask for donations.

<comment><USER34> Even if it's just a nice way to clear one's conscience from paying out some percentage as a generous bogus salary for a few years (no idea if that is happening or not), certainly an improvement over just not doing anything strictly illegal, which is often the best that could be said about a given ICO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I love how they fixed most (if not all) linear colorspace related issues in 2.10.

</comment><comment><USER36> So does this mean we finally get nondestructive editing to once and forall end the photoshop comparisons?

<comment><USER11> In v3.2, just as planned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > ... will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team > members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together

$100k is a sizable donation. I would have hoped that it could do more for the project than update some hardware and organize a hackfest. That's not to say donations in general shouldn't be used for those things. I just would have assumed that a donation _of this size_ would have been best utilised as salary/salaries, allowing contributors to focus a more significant portion of their time on GIMP, and be compensated accordingly.

<comment><USER38> In Europe (and I guess, the US too), $100K is not even enough to hire an engineer at an average rate for a year.

I'm not sure what you'd propose to do with it exactly?

<comment><USER24> I don't know where you work but there's plenty of places in Europe where you can hire a decent engineer for $100k a year.

<comment><USER38> Nah, there are plenty of places in Europe when a decent engineer _earns_ $100K/year (or less). That's not what the enterprise is paying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Well I'm dubious about all these cryptocurrency/ICO projects (and I've been using BTC since 2011), funding open source is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER40> "only" $100K - aren't we living in a world now where companies started in a garage make that amount of money ten times a second?

I haven't heard anything from e.g. Google or Facebook's open source funding endeavours. IMO every successful company should do their part and set aside a sizeable percentage of their revenue to paying and supporting open source projects and developers. It's wrong that e.g. the developer of cURL is (was?) struggling to make ends meet, when he (and the people behind gimp, etc) develops software used billions of times a day. That should make him hundreds of thousands a year.

<comment><USER41> Well in the end the world is not a fair place. Linux Torvalds isn't exactly loaded either, although he isn't poor. But In the end people are gonna abuse your products to make as much money as possible and there is no guarantee, you will ever see a penny of it if you sell it as Free Software.

<comment><USER42> I always think of Linus in these cases too.

Supposedly he's worth $150m, but even if that's accurate it would still mean he's only captured a very small % of the value he created.

<comment><USER43> This is surprising to me.

Someone as pragmatic as him, still working and taking/giving abuse at that "milemarker" of wealth? Huh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Free-to-play is huge in gaming, but in tooling it's not. Why? A free Photoshop integrating a brush marketplace would make a shit ton of money. A free Premiere with a marketplace for effects?

<comment><USER45> I think when you're in a serious work mood, not having fun playing a game, that sort of thing would be incredibly infuriating.

Also, Photoshop is usually paid for by people's employees anyway, so the user doesn't really care about the price.

<comment><USER44> > that sort of thing would be incredibly infuriating

Why? You already have to pay for these things, except you need to go look for them everywhere and find out how to import them and restore them from somewhere if you change machine. A marketplace for tooling is uber-valuable, and it's also an insane opportunity for creators who want to sell on these marketplaces.

The only thing I'm talking about is:

1\. make the software free

2\. incorporate a marketplace to find free or paid add-ons, brushes, effects, etc...

3\. take a cut

<comment><USER46> Okay, but why (1)? Why not just (2) and (3)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> As an artist who uses Gimp a lot, this pleases me very much.

</comment><comment><USER48> Are "Meetings" and "Hackfests" productive enough to justify spending all received money on them?

I have never been to such occasions, that's why I ask.

<comment><USER11> They are. See my comment below for an example from GIMP's latest hackfest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Everybody is complaining about the UI, however it is more or less the reason why i prefer Gimp to anything else. It is still a gui focused on getting things done instead of guiding you to do it.

However i havent worked with Photoshop for 10+ years, so i dont actually have a direct comparison. Having worked with other Adobe products (mostly Illustrator) i am glad however.

</comment><comment><USER50> GIMP's UI is too painful to make me use it. Please make the UI logical and respect system conventions. Standard keyboard shortcuts on my Mac do not work with GIMP. This is horrible for average users that want their software to just work.

</comment><comment><USER51> There's Affinity Photo / Designer that is pretty similar to Photoshop (UI & functionality) and cost around $50. No subscription, no bullshit. That's (kinda) affordable, right?

<comment><USER52> Affinity Photo / Designer are very very far from Photoshop. Affinity Photo is a replacement for Lightroom (raw photo editors), and Affinity Designer is a replacement for Adobe Illustrator (vector graphics).

Although you can do vectors and photo editing in Photoshop, the main purpose of PS is raster painting, which neither Affinity Photo nor Designer are remotely good at.

As such, neither of them could replace GIMP or Photoshop.

<comment> yoz-y Affinity Photo is very different from Lightroom and it is very good for general purpose raster editing including illustration.

I've used GIMP a lot and finally switched to Affinity Photo+Designer. It is, I must admit, much better for almost everything, the only thing GIMP still handles the best is selection and cropping.

Affinity Photo even supports Photoshop plugins (although I have not tried that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I used gimp the other day to resize an image with no training or experience. Thanks GIMP Team!

</comment><comment> ayr-ton This is nice. Hope to see new functionality and better usability. :-)

<comment><USER52> Keep hoping, because the GIMP team "will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting."

<comment><USER54> Introducing usability and functionality improvements isn't mutually exclusive from doing those. At the very least, I'd expect some improvements to come out of the hackfest.

<comment><USER11> The last time (winter 2017) we did a hackfest outside of Libre Graphics Meeting, we introduced a bunch of improvements to layers' blending and compositing, improved color management, improved the PSD loader/exporter, improved menu structure, introduced painting on transparent layers in modes other than Normal (which is _huge_ for painters), and introduced Flatpak builds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> >We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.

I don't like this. The money should be used for paying a developer or a couple to develop full time a central feature, like the UI, not to buy new hardware or organize hackfests.

<comment><USER56> How long do you think $100k lasts with two full-time devs exactly?

<comment><USER24> 3 months of a professional UI designer could easily quadruple the usefulness of GIMP for me. The UI, in its current state (I always use this disclaimer and it never changed in like 10 years), is a horrible mess and makes GIMP unusable for most professional work. There is no trend of it getting better. They need to hire someone from the outside, accepting that kick in the butt.

<comment><USER57> Overhauling the GIMP UI would take way longer than three months of a single UI designer. As an operation, we are talking UI/UX design, implementation, testing, and not to mention having to refactor existing code such that it can actually handle such a radical UI change.

I'd put the (very fuzzy) estimate at something like 2 years of consistent (full time) effort from a team of, say, 5 people. That puts the cost of such a change closer to a million dollars.

<comment><USER11> Yay, at least someone gets it :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Data Matching and Reconciliation machine learning algorithms suggestions - <AUTHOR> I am trying to solve Data reconciliation problem using ML and need suggestions on which algorithm would be suitable? Follow the link to get more elaboration: https://www.kaggle.com/questions-and-answers/171307 <comment><USER2> In your example it seems the primary clue to find matches is the name, i.e. 'ABC' \+ Corp/Des/etc. So how about doing some fuzzy string matching? Once you have done this you can identify edge cases and additionally group by dates or whatever.

So you would have 'ABC' in L and a selection of matches in S. If not all of the matches in S actually belong to the ABC in L you are faced with the Knapsack Problem[0] that you can solve with different methods(sorry, no expert here).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem)

</comment><comment><USER3> You mean comparing data? For what purpose (to help assess solution) ... and why ML? Surely a rules engine is much more practical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Umm... not comparing data but taking a data point and finding its nearest data points whose amounts nets to zero. Rule engine might work on a data where the data is not complex but here there are a lot of complexities like you don't have exact matching features which gives enough surety to rule based matching engine.</comment></comment>


The HTML5 Experiments of Hakim El Hattab  - <AUTHOR> http://hakim.se/experiments/

<comment><USER2> I work with him (<http://f-i.com>) and he is an incredibly talented interactive developer. His work, and these demos show an extreme attention to detail and an incredibly nice, human touch to interaction and motion.

Alright, I'll stop. Just make sure to check out the demos.

Plus, here's a blog entry he wrote on HTML5 and his experiences - [http://www.kontain.com/fi/entries/94636/thoughts-on- html5-ca...](http://www.kontain.com/fi/entries/94636/thoughts-on- html5-canvas/)

<comment><USER3> These are real interesting and nice interaction models. Definitely some of the better interactive work I've seen going on in canvas land.

These types of experiments definitely push the boundary of what we can do today with HTML5. And as deficiencies we find at that boundary are exposed (performance, interaction issues, audio, etc.) the spec will only get better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It never really sank in with me until this: flash is dead.

Those were gorgeous. The mark of good software is that it inspires you think of uses for its underlying technology. As of now, I actually take "HTML5" seriously, thanks to this.

We should see more robust libraries, and even "authoring tools" in the near future.

<comment><USER5> Actionscript 3.0 is much more sophisticated than Javascript/HTML5. The capabilities of HTML5 are equivalent to Actionscript1.0/Flash Player 6, circa 2004 (these demos were entirely possible even in Flash Player 5 perhaps). Plus, Flash is reasonably cross-platform (except for iPhone/iPad of course). On another note, making embeddable widgets (slideshows, videos with more than just viewing functionality, like Youtube) is very hard in Javascript, since any complex embedded Javascript would likely clash with other scripts on the page (we have experienced this, making a complex Javascript widget, that ended up clashing with Adsense ads of our customers, it was a nightmare to debug that).

Incidentally, I brought up my task manager while viewing these demos, the CPU utilization jumped from 5% to 97% (Core 2 Duo, 1.66 GHz).

<comment><USER6> Wait for an year or two. IMHO, HTML5 is going to evolve much faster than ActionScript. When I saw these kind of cool animations in Flash years ago, I wanted to play around with it but couldn't see the source. It was all hidden behind the swf/fla files making it harder to see how things were done. If I wanted to fiddle with it I needed Flash software. Not so with HTML5. All you need is a text editor and a browser. I am sure whoever this link would have tried to look at the source.

> making embeddable widgets is very hard in Javascript, since any complex > embedded Javascript would likely clash with other scripts on the page

You can use local variables the way jQuery uses it. Something like (function($))(jQuery). If you declare all your variables and functions within this scope its easy to avoid clashes with other scripts.

<comment><USER7> > _When I saw these kind of cool animations in Flash years ago, I wanted to > play around with it but couldn't see the source._

While technically all JS is open-source / source-visible, just wait: where there's a market, there _will_ be more and more sophisticated obfuscation techniques. Especially for a language like JS, where it can easily generate and modify its own code.

<comment><USER8> While I do not care for obfuscation for its IP protection function, having the source visible and accessible is a problem for games: how can we know that top scores are valid and a variable has not been modified? Basically, all JS games are cheatable. John Resig talked about this <http://bit.ly/bO3bcf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is beautiful.

It reminded me a lot of an online puzzle game called Auditorium. If you liked these demos, and have even the slightest interest in puzzle games, I really recommend checking it out (free, pretty long demo): <http://www.playauditorium.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does he need a resume when applying for a job? What if you got this from him in your pile of resumes:

      Degree: None
      Experience: None
      Skills: Javascript ninja & rockstar, watch this [url]

Would you hire him?

<comment><USER2> Short answer: Yes, after talking to him in person and making sure he's a social fit, too.

If it's of interest, we hired him from Hyperisland (<http://www.hyperisland.se>), a school in Sweden focused on interactive design and development. The school is top notch and most students end up in interactive agencies.

And if it's of further interest, our best designers and the CEO never attended college. They simple have been passionate about design from a young age and had enough drive to pursue their craft to master it. For the interactive agency industry, it really just matters what you can produce, so a spectacular portfolio without degrees to back it up can land you a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems to be more like the Canvas experiments of Hakim.

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of java applet and flash demos from the nineties. Except this time it's done without any browser plugin, which is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, the monster from Fullmetal, that was freaky!

( _hold down the mouse button and drag or click across the page_ )

</comment><comment> Ocho-Bits I really want to learn do to stuff like this. Could you guys give me some pointers on where to start?

<comment><USER14> Right click view source. Reading code and trying to understand it is key to learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> seriously amazing!

As for flash, if it can do or does anything as gorgeous I haven't yet seen it.

Thanks to Hakim and bigstorm.</comment>


Show HN: EmberJS Bootstrap - Require.js,Twitter Bootstrap and Handlebar - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/colintoh/ember-bootstrap

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my first Ember contribution after playing with it for a few weeks. Should get you up and running with a EmberJS app within minutes. Please feel free to ping me if you have any suggestion for improvement for it

<comment><USER2> Couple of noob questions: 1\. Is the latest jQuery incompatible with Ember? 2\. Why is underscore included?

<comment><USER3> Why are there javascripts, besides require.js, being loaded in the HTML file? Shouldn't require.js's config handle all of these?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least put it in a gh-pages branch so we can see it without having to download and view locally.</comment>


Creating a Radial Menu in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13132864/circular-tooltip/13137862#13137862

<comment><USER2> As another commenter here notes, this is in fact a "radial menu."

Terminology is important. Language loses power when we use words incorrectly, so please: Do not call this a "tooltip." Tooltips are _only_ ever displayed on hover (and disappear when the mouse leaves the described object — originally, the tool for which the tip was needed!)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is also known as a radial menu, and has some great properties that make it better (faster) than a normal context menu.

You should be able to select an item from the menu in a single fast (distance insensitive) mouse gesture. Click down on the star, drag in the direction of an option, and release the mouse to select it. This way you can choose an option without having to stop after a certain distance of dragging, and you can memorize the different directions of frequently used commands.

This demo doesn't implement that behavior yet though - so while it looks cool this version is still missing the big benefit of this type of ui.

<comment><USER4> I think you'd find a majority of users would be confused by this, as cool as it sounds, the first time around. I cannot think of a single instance of a popular web application that uses a click and hold mechanic of any kind (not to be confused with dragging and dropping). People are used to clicking, not holding, meaning they might never see the required secondary action of moving the mouse over a new button.

You could of course add some kind of time delay, but then they would simply be clicking a second time to interact, and this defeats the entire purpose of the click and hold mechanic.

This is not to say I don't think you could train users to get used to this mechanic, but from a first-time user perspective, this still falls under "bad UX" in my book.

<comment><USER5> > _I think you'd find a majority of users would be confused by this, as cool > as it sounds, the first time around._

It doesn't matter if they are confused "the first time around" as long as they can do their job better and faster the second and nth time around.

That's how UI progresses -- not just by self-evident things, but also by people learning new idioms.

 _> I cannot think of a single instance of a popular web application that uses a click and hold mechanic of any kind._

The "kudos" button on Subtle is "hover and hold". I'm sure there are others.

<comment><USER4> This is completely subjective, but I'd prefer to design interactions around what I know my users are already comfortable with. My goal is to enable my users to get to their end goal with the least amount of friction as possible.

Why would I train a user to learn something new when the method in the OP achieves the exact same result, without a learning curve?

All I can see improving with the click, hold, and release method is enhanced "cool factor".

<comment><USER5> > _This is completely subjective, but I'd prefer to design interactions around > what I know my users are already comfortable with. My goal is to enable my > users to get to their end goal with the least amount of friction as > possible._

Well, there's a compromise, though, between:

(a) "designing interactions around what I know my users are already comfortable with"

(b) "enabling users to get to their end goal with the least amount of friction as possible"

in all cases where an initial unfamiliarity with a new idiom lowers the friction for hundreds of subsequent uses.

As a crude example, consider "undo" in a painting application. Say the user wants to erase all he did up to this point. We could let the artists work the way they are "already familiar with" (paint on top to cover their mistakes, or use some eraser tool to delete the whole thing part by part).

But by having them learn the concept of "undo", they could achieve the same effect faster. And even better if the learned the concept of "history" (jumping to arbitrary undo states).

(Now in those cases, all the above options can also be present at all times -- so the users don't have to give up one for another. But there are other cases where this is not the case, and you have to decide upon the better but new way to design a control vs the old, clunkier, but familiar).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you don't need all that glitz, here's a jQuery plug-in: <http://zikes.github.io/circle-menu/>

The best (semi)circular menus I've seen recently are in the iD editor for OpenStreetMap: <http://ideditor.com/>

<comment><USER7> The reason of the post is not the circular menu itself but the fact that it's entirely made in CSS. I think this is really impressive.

<comment><USER8> I'm genuinely curious: why is that exciting? I don't know a huge amount about the web stack.

<comment><USER9> Usually JavaScript would be used to create the flyout menu effect like you see in the Dabblet. But since it's done in CSS3 any browsers which support those standard properties can work - no need for any JS code. It's just a neat workaround and very impressive IMO.

<comment><USER10> Do more browsers currently support JS or CSS3? (eg up to jquery 1.9 or similar) Not sure I've seen the stats on that as of yet and I'm curious.

<comment><USER11> Do any browsers with any real marketshare (even a tenth of a percent) not support JavaScript? I can't think of any examples although I've never had any reason to dive too deep into browser compatibility specifics for my projects.

<comment><USER12> Even if they do it can be turned off pretty easy. CSS wouldn't be affected in that way (I would think).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love pie menus. The stock Android Browser's hidden "quick controls" are incredible and by far the fastest way to use a mobile web browser. You slide your thumb in off the side of the screen and then in the same motion move to the action you're looking for and simply release to activate. It's not obvious unless you show the user it's there but once you have it you don't want to go back.

link for the curious: [http://www.droid-life.com/2012/02/07/tip-browser-quick- contr...](http://www.droid-life.com/2012/02/07/tip-browser-quick-controls- expanded-in-android-4-0-4/)

<comment><USER13> The stock camera app in Jelly Bean also has a particularly good implementation of a radial menu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember an article in Dr. Dobbs hailing pie menus as the future of user interfaces. It was the early 90's. I have always thought they were a great idea.

Currently Microsoft Office One Note uses them.

Here's a list of references for pie menus (the Dr. Dobbs article is cited):

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/boom/2001sp/bronevetsky/Circle%20M...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/boom/2001sp/bronevetsky/Circle%20Menu%20References.htm)

In fairness to Dr. Dobbs, they also hailed hypertext as the future about that time, and that one they nailed.

<comment><USER15> 1993's Secret of Mana was well known for its ring menu. I don't think radial menus are practical with mice, they fit controllers and console games better (where interacting with menus is slower).

<comment><USER16> Agreed, I think that radial menus are only really good for touch screens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very impressive how close the answerer gets to the questioners mock up. Good job that man!

And yet, I bet the designer will still come back and say the curve isn't right, or the bar isn't think enough.

I think that's some impressive CSS.

<comment><USER18> Interestingly, 'that man' is apparently a woman: <http://stackoverflow.com/users/1397351/ana>

<comment><USER17> Oh yeah, so it is.

Didn't think to check. Doesn't make any difference to me, man or women. It's good work.

No offence intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I made a similar tool for quickly navigating between tabs in Chrome:

[http://www.appsforartists.com/get_app/chrome_marking_menu/?s...](http://www.appsforartists.com/get_app/chrome_marking_menu/?source=hn)

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone find the "Anna, marry me?" comment to be a tad sexist? /ducks

<comment><USER21> Yes. Not to mention the one commenter that "would like to stalk" her. Flagged that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great demo. Not to nitpick, but the original poster's question was about a 3 item menu. It would be nice if the CSS allowed arbitrary number of elements. Right now, deleting one of the 5 links seems to break the design. Seems like something SASS could handle.

<comment><USER23> I'm not a webdev, but the code says:

      /*
      * rotate each slice at the right angle = (A/2)° + (k - (n+1)/2)*A°
      * where A is the angle of 1 slice (30° in this case)
      * k is the number of the slice (in {1,2,3,4,5} here)
      * and n is the number of slices (5 in this case)
      * formula works for odd number of slices (n odd)
      * for even number of slices (n even) the rotation angle is (k - n/2)*A°
      *
      * after rotating, skew on Y by 90°-A°; here A° = the angle for 1 slice = 30°
      */

So there's a calculation to be done. I guess there are various ways to get around that.

<comment><USER24> ...so SASS?

<comment><USER25> SASS could help you generate the required CSS, but you would still need some kind of customized markup, dynamic call to a SASS function, or JavaScript if you wanted to support a truly arbitrary/dynamic/database-driven number of buttons.

<comment><USER26> A number of different static CSS files even - static5.css

Or a serverside script in your favourite language - static.css?slices=5

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's getting nice right there -- slick CSS implementation and a sweet design.

Having authored a jQuery Radial Menu plugin[1], I'll add that I have seen significant interest in the interface/plugin from a ton of folks over the years, but few real world implementations that have engaged me beyond first glance.

Personally I find the interface best utilized in situations where I'd rather not divert my attention and am performing similar tasks frequently - like in some games. When it comes to getting _creative_ with the UI component as a developer, though, I've found it tough to do _really_ well. It gets gimmick-y quickly. Path's QuadCurveMenu has been the best implementation of any type of circular menu that I've seen. Summly had a radial menu as well, but I didn't find it particularly useful - just fun to play with.

For anyone interested, here are some examples using the radmenu plugin: <http://tikku.com/jquery-radmenu-plugin#radmenu_tutorial_4>. Also, my site opens up with a radial menu: <http://www.tikku.com>.

Would love to hear thoughts from any other folks that have actually experimented with the radial menu interface?

[1]<http://plugins.jquery.com/radmenu/>

</comment><comment><USER28> It's amazing the economic value Ana created by posting this. It's gorgeous, and every single web designer can (and where appropriate, should) now use this to make themselves look SO much better.

I wonder if the people who have posted the flagship answers on Stack Overflow know what heroes they are.

</comment><comment><USER29> WebPie is a JavaScript version of the same: <http://www.markusfisch.de/>

It's smoother and more responsive than the jQuery plugin mentioned in this thread.

And, of course, the site above has the incomparable PieDock for Linux/BSD.

</comment><comment><USER28> Whooaaa I just realized, unless I'm mistaken, this isn't actually a functional menu. If you add actual href's to the menu items, they don't take you anywhere because as soon as they're clicked the focus is removed, so the href does nothing.

</comment><comment><USER30> My friend created this: <http://permalightnyc.com/experiments/radial-menu>

</comment><comment><USER31> For some reason on my computer that it renders like this: <http://i.imgur.com/ycKsaim.png>

<comment><USER5> It would so much more valuable if you also included browser and version!

<comment><USER31> lol. Pardon me. Chrome Version 26.0.1410.65 (up to date)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is amazing.

But it makes me think about how much easier it would have been to make that in Flash 10 years ago. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a variant of the "pie menu".

</comment><comment><USER34> FWIW, it breaks if you use Tab to cycle through the links.

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately, CSS does not support a "has", "contains", or "parent" selector, which would be required to support this.

        .button:focus + .tip, .tip.open, .tip:has(a:focus)

One line of jQuery should solve:

        $('.tip a').focus(function(){ $('.tip').addClass('open'); }).blur(function(){ $('.tip').removeClass('open'); });

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> looks nice.. thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER36> Really cool!</comment>


Leaked video from Mt. Gox employee alleges they'll be closed within months - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvT8fCUmU3Q

<comment><USER2> This is clearly a scammer trying to get money from people. I wish I could vote down...

</comment><comment><USER3> This video is coming up on 3 weeks old. The person who made the video (likely not the poster to HN) is just scamming people for 5% of their exchanges. I have serious doubts this is real.</comment>


Show HN: Puntly – Product Hunt for Everyone (SAVE/share Your Best Stuff) - <AUTHOR> http://punt.ly?s=%23apps

<comment><AUTHOR> Think twitter meets pinterest (LIKES are more like tweets, less like pretty pictures). It's fully live. If just testing with random input please delete all posts.</comment>


A Gentle Introduction to Compile-Time Computing (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/a-gentle-introduction-to-compile-time-computing-part-1-d4d96099cea0 <comment><AUTHOR> Every time you make one assumption when coding, you leave it in one place and never spread it to other code pieces. Everybody wants to do that, but it is all easier said than done with current tools.

Writeup comes in parts:

1: [https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/a-gentle-introduction- to-...](https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/a-gentle-introduction-to-compile- time-computing-part-1-d4d96099cea0)

2: [https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/a-gentle-introduction- to-...](https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/a-gentle-introduction-to-compile- time-computing-part-2-cb0a46f6cfe8)

Part 3 finishing, soon.</comment>


Eclipse Che – Next-Generation Eclipse IDE, Cloud IDE, and Workspace Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.eclipse.org/che/ <comment><USER2> "Because I want my IDE to be named after someone who tortured people in a basement before he had them shot."

Do we have Eclipse Pol Pot to look forward to?

At least the corporate sponsorships hopefully have him spinning in his grave like an ultracentrifuge.</comment>


YC is a cult - <AUTHOR> http://www.danielharan.com/2008/07/28/yc-is-a-cult/ <comment><USER2> Actually there's a fundamental incompatibility between cults and startups. Cult followers tend to be people who want someone to tell them what to do. There are a lot of people like that, but they're the opposite of the kind of people who make good startup founders. What you want in a startup founder is the sort of tenacious independent mindedness that makes you start a new search engine in 1998, when everyone else thinks it's too late.

If the startups we funded were run by the kind of people who'd feel at home in a cult, they'd get creamed as soon as they hit the real world, and our returns would be terrible. A regular company could tend toward the cultish and succeed (some technology companies show signs of it), but a venture firm couldn't be, because its startups would lose in the market.

<comment><USER3> So, what's up with these insane hours?

You've written about the need for working long hours, but aren't Michael Parkatti and Mike Marrone taking it a bit too far?

<comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, how hard people work has little correlation with whether they have follower-type personalities. It does, however, have quite a high correlation with working on a startup. So my guess is the cause is that they're working on a startup.

<comment><USER3> So do you condone working such long hours that founders are routinely sleep deprived?

<comment><USER4> _"Even during Viaweb I still slept 8 hours a night (roughly 3-11). The most productive people rarely have more than 6 hours or so of really concentrated work per day, except in emergencies. If you can ensure you get that every day, you don't need to economize on sleep..."_ \-- by pg 358 days ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778>

<comment><USER5> So Say We All.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      - People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
      - Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
      - They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic; [sic]
      - They get a new identity based on the group;
      - They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream
      culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

To the extent that YC fits this definition, so does any intense and ambitious collaboration. Take the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, and some parts of the Human Genome Project -- they all fit criteria 1, 2, 4, and the first part of 5 to a much greater extent than YC ever does.

So it looks like we have a broken test function. (Though perhaps it's just missing a type-check -- maybe it's only supposed to be applied to religions.)

<comment><USER7> Come on now, let's not go overboard here and compare YC to the Manhattan Project or Apollo missions. Doing a start-up is hard work, but we're talking about a slightly different scale here.

<comment><USER8> Why do you think starting a company is less demanding than being a member of the Manhattan Project or Apollo teams?

"Scale" is exactly the right word -- Apollo didn't happen because one person worked more insanely hard than anyone else had worked in the history of the universe. It was a large project with a lot of people (and a lot of science). Yes, a lot of them worked hard. But please, measure effort on a human scale. It doesn't matter whether you're starting a company or developing a new technology for space travel -- if you're pouring your whole life into it, the same psychological conditions can apply.

<comment><USER9> Except, in Apollo people died/can die. They didn't work 18 hours a day because you make mistakes at that point. If your "web application" fails, no one really bats an eye. But if you start killing people - it is a bit different. Please don't compare these toy companies that get created, which barely have a business model much less a purpose, to one of the greatest achievements of all time just because you sit in front of your computer for long hours.

<comment><USER10> _Except, in Apollo people died/can die._

That is a rather silly criterion. _All_ engineers build things that can kill people if they go wrong. That's what engineers do.

You think that social software can't be used to kill people? Do you know the number of people (mostly women) who are murdered each year by stalkers, most of whom are former lovers or spouses? Do you want to bet that _none_ of those stalkers have used, say, Google to help locate their victims?

Do you think that having your identity stolen and your bank account drained can't lead directly to your death? What, do you live in a country where health insurance is guaranteed to all citizens? (Oh, wait -- perhaps you do. Never mind.)

"Toy companies"? Interesting choice of phrase. Here's what one minute's Googling found for me: A court case, _Estate of Matthew C. Metzgar v. Playskool, Inc_ :

[http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=3rd&#...
the plaintiffs' expert, E. Patrick McGuire, reported for the record that in one year studied, 1988, there were eleven deaths due to aspiration of small toys or toy parts by children... the plaintiffs submitted a CPSC estimate reported in the House Congressional Record that in each year from 1980-88, an average of 3,200 small children were treated in hospital emergency rooms for toy related ingestion and aspiration injuries. The CPSC also reported that between 1980 and 1991, 186 children choked on small toys, toy parts, and other children's products.
Frankly, from the viewpoint of danger and death, the space program's engineers are wimps: They do very dangerous things, but they only endanger a handful of people at a time. A toy engineer who specifies the wrong paint can kill hundreds of babies at once. Social software is pretty safe, but if the odds that a Facebook user will be killed because of a Facebook design error are as small as one per 100 million user-years [1], the company stands to lose 1 user per year, because they have 90 million active users.
[1] I have no data, but I doubt the odds are that small. I'd be astonished if Facebook hadn't already been a factor in thousands of suicides, for example. One of the reasons why humans are so incredibly talented at socializing is that it's fraught with peril.

<comment><USER9> Apollo engineers make a design mistake, it kills people. If you don't like that because it doesn't effect enough people (Sorry I didn't realize that since Facebook serves 100 million people it is more of a feat than going to the moon) lets talk about Boeing. Boeing makes a design mistake, hundreds of people die. That has happened and will continue to happen.

Now you compare that to Facebook - if Facebook or Google goes down, who dies?

And this whole stalker point - wtf does that have to do with anything. Do you think there where no stalkers before the internet? The fact that people misuse something doesn't make it the engineers fault. If I designed kitchen knives and it is used to kill someone is it my fault? Hell no. But if I design a hatch door that doesn't open because of a design flaw, and people die, that is my fault.

That responsibility is the difference.

<comment><USER2> I think the test of the importance of your work is not how much people will be hurt if you screw up, but how much people's lives are improved if you succeed. Some of the most important work is done by people working quietly on mundane problems. Judged by the standard of how much it contributes to people's well- being, Google probably does more for the world than the Apollo missions did.

<comment><USER11> Ok PG's response seems almost like flamebait. I had to respond and try to voice my disagreement.

 _I think the test of the importance of your work is not how much people will be hurt if you screw up, but how much people's lives are improved if you succeed._

I notice you leave out the Manhattan Project. Through which nuclear power was discovered. And later those same researchers discovered Quantum Electrodynamics... which will likely be the next hardware solution for computer science.

 _Judged by the standard of how much it contributes to people's well-being, Google probably does more for the world than the Apollo missions did._

As for Apollo versus Google - come on. Search (PageRank) & improved web mail (GMail) versus safe commercial air travel, radio and satellite communication, safe structures, better roads, GPS, etc. Maybe there weren't advancements to Computer Science. But, there were major advancements in civil, construction, electrical and mechanical engineering.

 _The program spurred advances in many areas of technology peripheral to rocketry and manned spaceflight. These include major contributions in the fields of avionics, telecommunications, and computers. The program sparked interest in many fields of engineering, including pioneering work using statistical methods to study the reliability of complex systems made from component parts. The physical facilities and machines which were necessary components of the manned spaceflight program remain as landmarks of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering._ from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program>

Separately the Apollo program had a cultural impact on the students and engineers of the time and even today. I know I am inspired by what the program did with such limited technology.

[EDIT: Some details and another quote]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love contrarian articles.

Not only is it fun reading a scathing criticism, (and I think he went too far in some ways and not far enough in others) the really funny part is watching the target audience digest (or rather, regurgitate) it.

There is a strange similarity between YC and a cult. You guys quote PG all the time like he's the next Buddha or something. YC is looked at as the only way towards making your startup happen. Sometimes around application time the posts get really out there as far as hero worship -- and Paul's said so himself.

Having said that, there's a LOT of dissension here as well. Lots of folks that have nothing to do with YC and just think Paul's a nice, regular schmuck like the rest of us. I know I'm here because of the crowd -- and by that I mean the larger startup crowd, not necessarily the YC bunch. This is the first board I've been on that has a long-running discussion about how single-arrow voting sucks, for one thing, or the role of contrarian comments in a healthy community.

So yeah, he's got a bit of a point. But it's mostly overblown, and I wouldn't worry about it. If you're 22 years old and don't have somebody to look up to? Then I'd start worrying.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hilarious. Blatant linkbait, but hilarious.

Clearly he does not know many actual participants. Working 18 hour days for two months is not the norm.

<comment><USER3> Thank you :)

So, what exactly is the norm? What we hear from blog entries and the like is that you're all working from the time you get up to the time you fall asleep clutching your laptops.

<comment><USER14> Cults are defined in other ways too:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult#Definition_according_to_se...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult#Definition_according_to_secular_opposition)

"A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of [consequences of] leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community."

For and exhaustive list, see here: <http://rickross.com/sg_alpha.html>

This is no laughing matter. People's lives are ruined by cults, and even if taken away from a cult, their effects linger.

<comment><USER3> "Unethically manipulative"!? WTF is that?

<comment><USER15> I think that a mother using reverse psychology to motivate her child to do her homework is "ethically manipulative." I think a national leader using lies to lead his country into war is unethically manipulative. I don't yet have a formula for it though.

<comment><USER13> I don't like that formula, because in both cases the manipulator would think it's for their own good. It's too subjective.

<comment><USER15> Well, that's why there is no formula! It's a sticky wicket. In the case of the mother and child, in most cases, the mother is correct in thinking it's "for their own good." Also, in that case, there's good reason to believe that the child doesn't know what's best.

So don't try to put any formula in my mouth. I explicitly said I had none!

(It's like porn: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.")

<comment><USER13> Well, I guess I meant that any formula you come up with around that statment suffers from revisionist history, and a very subjective view of what is really good. I was objecting to the formula you hadn't pinned down based on the output.

Most people would say that George W Bush deceived us into invading Iraq. Had he found a few nukes lying around, would that still have been unethical? A lot of people who think his actions were unethical now would probably not if the results were different, even though nothing was known at the time he did it.

<comment><USER15> If George W. _knew_ that there were nukes lying around Iraq and used deception to motivate the US to go to war to get them, then I'd say that would be better than the current situation, but I'm still not sure it would be ethical. However, it looks like he knew there weren't nukes or any sort of WMDs there.

In the case of the mom, the prospects for long term harm are minimal and the potential for long term benefit are pretty good. In the case of taking a country to war, there's always a whole lot of potential for long term harm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's as bad as it might seem. I'd rather have this on the frontpage than lolcats or accident pictures. In fact, I think some of the people who upvote or submit things like this do it as a way of keeping News.YC good. They don't want the site to degenerate into an intellectual monoculture. That doesn't mean they necessarily agree with everything it says.

Back in the 1960s, the Communists used to get so many votes in French elections that some people in the US worried the country would align with Russia. But as Laurence Wylie pointed out in _Village in the Vaucluse_ (great book btw), most of the voters didn't actually agree with the Communists' policies. They were just voting for them because they worried that the dominant party was getting too powerful. Really they were voting for diversity.

<comment><USER16> I'd rather see LOLCATs.

I haven't quite figured out how to articulate what's wrong with this kind of thing, but it's somewhat similar to Fox news -- they're not simply useless, they're corrosive.

I'm still trying to think of a better explanation. Disagreement is fine and good, but this kind of thing is something else. The 37signals posts do a good job of presenting an alternate perspective, but in a way that is generally positive and helpful.

<comment><USER12> I'd like to see you explain yourself better, Paul.

How can free speech corrode anything? Is it like when you tell a kid there's no Santa Claus, then you've hurt his innocence with your cynicism?

It sounds like you've got your thumb on a very specific feeling, and I'd be interested to hear about it, but heck if I can figure out where you're going.

I'm a big free speech guy, and I love a good kick in the butt from time to time, so I liked it for that reason. WE always want to judge our position against our critics, right? If not we're just living in a echo-room. But that's just me.

<comment><USER2> Free speech is not a _type_ of speech. It's a policy about speech.

So the question reduces to "How can speech be corrosive?" Corrosive is not a very precise word, but I can guess what Paul means: he means when people are deliberately intellectually dishonest, as for example Fox News seems to be. When someone (a) deliberately misrepresents what an opponent is saying (b) as if he were attacking something that is a hot button for the audience, and then (c) replies with rousing platitudes.

<comment><USER12> Free speech as a policy has consistently been interpreted as political speech, that is, speech about what or what not we should be doing. It this sense of speech as a voice of opposition calling for change in the status quo that I meant.

Sorry to make so many jumps, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to use the term in any other way -- obviously I'm not talking about speech one does not have to pay for. Or speech that is unconstrained.

There's a fine difference between honestly describing what you believe to be the other person's views, exaggerating the other person's views in order to show how his/her argument fails at the extremes, and purposely mis-stating the other person's views simply to mock them without giving them a fair chance at explanation.

We do all three of these all of the time in normal arguments, btw.

I just couldn't equate the blog to the TV channel reference. I'm not going to defend Fox News, mainly because I don't think they need defending. I'm unaware of anything that seems "wrong" about them, save for the fact they seem to bug the heck out of more progressive people. But it seemed like two different genres, and two completely different animals.

There's an interesting question in there about blogs in general, and the tendency in media for consumers to prefer people who rant and rave, as I notice many of the later evening cable news entertainment shows doing. (Note the separation of news, news commentary, and news entertainment) I wonder why this type of "corrosive" media attracts so many viewers? Is there a large group of people, for instance, that really want to hear YC misrepresented and trashed? I don't believe that. I believe the article in question only exaggerated a bit to show where the site could be headed. If not, there's nothing stopping us from using his piece for that purpose.

It just always raises my hairs when somebody says something to the effect of "stop that man! He's saying something dangerous!" or the like. I'm just curious. EDIT: Paul did not use the word "dangerous." he only implied that this article was in some different category of bad speech beyond LOLCats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This guy is presumptuous, ill informed and appears to have a thing for blanket statements.

Hi, I'm currently in YC for the summer. Although I certainly don't speak for everyone in YC, I think I'm somewhat more qualified than the author who has never been in the program and who apparently receives his information from blog posts and hearsay.

Most of his assertions apply to startups or any intense forms of collaboration (as PC noted) in general. Although we work a significant amount of hours, it's not as if we never get out. I've gotten to know many of the other cofounders very well outside of YC. Additionally, is it really work if you enjoy what you're doing? I rather work 60-80 hours per week on something I like that challenges me, than 40 hours per week on something I'm disinterested in. As for the pure speculative, link-baiting stuff:

"Young, impressionable and inexperienced entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice their health, happiness and creativity while pursuing wealth." This is the second company I've started. It's my business partner's second as well. Many of the founders in YC have worked at startups or run their own businesses before.

Happiness/Creativity? I went from working a 9-7 office job I wasn't interested in to working on my dream project.

Health? Due to increased schedule flexibility, I've actually been able to exercise more and eat better. I've lost a good 5 lbs.

"They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic..." You should have been at my team's first meeting; it was like this, but the opposite. Informal founder feedback sessions have been similar. The carebear environment the author described wouldn't work anyway - the VCs would destroy us.

"They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled." Isolation? My parents just visited this past weekend. I still keep in touch with all of my friends even if many of them wear the hat of beta tester. If anything, I've been able to keep in _better_ touch with my friends because they're all curious about what I'm working on. Talking about a startup is a lot more fun than talking about a 9-5 or 9-7 for that matter.

Without YC I'd still be at my same old job trying to work on our startup on the side. This is not only difficult to do, but very slow as well. YC essentially moved everything up a year or two and allowed us to work on what we love while being surrounded with a bunch of brilliant people to bounce ideas off of and anxious investors to present to. What more could two cofounders originally from Ohio ask for?

<comment><USER18> You know, one of the common characteristics of people who have been brainwashed (by a cult or otherwise) is that they absolutely do not believe that they have been brainwashed, and will fight that suggestion with all their strength, coming up with never-ending explanations for why they haven't been brainwashed at all!

</tongue-in-cheek>

<comment><USER19> OTOH, if you were brainwashed into believing another group was brainwashed, you will fight any suggestion the other group was not brainwashed and come up with an unending stream of reasons to believe they were.

<comment><USER18> Even more twisted: what if you were brainwashed into thinking that people who have been brainwashed don't believe they've been brainwashed? Would you be able to tell whether you've been brainwashed yourself or whether it's the rest of the world that's brainwashed?

The world would be a strange place... but very clean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you love what you do and are good at it, programming is only somewhat more mentally exhausting than playing computer games all day (and I do relatively complicated stuff: algorithms and numerical math in C++ and ML - don't ask about details, I like my relative anonymity).

The "burnout" happens when there is no reward in sight, or worse: you work hard for many months, produce good results, then your PHB shits on them for political reasons (so you wouldn't get too stuck up), or is just too stupid to appreciate your work.

I'm not a web programmer, and I tend to be very skeptical of much of what PG writes (especially the last few years), but I think independent enterprise is the way to go for the more gifted and hard-working people.

<comment><USER21> There is some evidence that your ability to make good decisions is depleted as you make decisions:

<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making>

(No matter how fun the act of decision making is)

<comment><USER20> That's pretty interesting. I find the cube scary to look at, for some reason. Makes it hard to read the text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22>
      - People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
      - Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
      - They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic; [sic]
      - They get a new identity based on the group;
      - They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream
      culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

You mean just like doing a PhD or building a company or heck, being a geek about anything in life. A baseball fan who can recite stats about everything and everyone for the past 100 years is, by this definition, part of a cult.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does YC require its participants to practice polygamy? I checked the FAQ but this wasn't covered.

<comment><USER24> What happens at the Yscraper stays at the Yscraper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> First there was "All YC startups produce unoriginal second-rate stuff" (unfortunately, I don't have the link handy). Now there's this. It is impressive how YC-hate is evolving.

<comment><USER26> If you plot its success and the hate it receives on a graph I think you'll see a strong correlation.

<comment><USER27> If you've read [http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0...](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/08/physics_of_pass.html) you wouldn't be surprised at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Obviously the guy is trolling, but a useful question does emerge: Are people taking pg's advice without critically evaluating it? If they do not then all is fine and dandy but if they do, the guy has a point (albeit poorly presented).

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure that's it.

Just because many, many people take pg's advice doesn't mean they aren't evaluating it. We only hear about the ones that come to the opposite conclusion (that he's wrong).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The best definition of a cult that I've heard was from some guy on NPR (no clue who, I was driving and came in mid-program)... he said, quite simply, that a cult is any organization who's ulterior motive is to have sex with minors. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but I think it fits pretty well.

<comment><USER13> By that definition, I know a lot of guys who are cults.

<comment><USER31> I think it's different when that's the overt motive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So what?

I sometime doubt why I've been living my life most of time by ignoring mainstream culture, being isolated from my relatives, with a few really good friends far below Dunbar's number that will help each other without questions, working 60 to 80 hours on non leisure stuffs, and living in the opposite side of the earth to my birth place since I was 15. I even joined a quasi-cult organization once to see how does it work. It has been a quarter of century and I love it. Because I do what I want to hack in my life and I learn from PG that beside that I also need to figure how to make something that people want! And I still have some chance to know some very attractive females and keeping myself fit.

At least I feel much better now because I know I can survive under inhuman conditions so I just need to persist till I get my share of glory. Of course I may die tomorrow but I didn't live a life that feel pressure from peers, pointing hair boss and failed marriages.

<comment><USER33> It's responses like these that at the very least do very little to disprove the author's point.

Of course YC is not a cult and PG is not a cult leader, but some people here do seem to treat them as such. Some of the questions asked here (like the "Is 40 years too old to start a startup" one alluded to in the original article) and some of the material posted here (like the ramblings of the poor college kid who thought being glued to a computer for 80 hours a week was a fulfilling existence) indicate that PG's message "running a startup is one of the most rewarding things you can do in your life" gets distorted in some people's minds to "running a startup is the only thing in your life that's worthwhile to do".

The irony, of course, is that PG himself, in his writings, demonstrates an interest in a lot of other things besides web start ups. It's not only PG who seems to have an unusually broad world view, however. The same holds true for a large number of the people who post here.

Unfortunately, a small number of people such as yourself seem to overlook that and reduce the message (if there is such a thing, which I doubt) to something ridiculous. The author definitely has a point there.

<comment><USER32> Hmm,

Did I say I glue myself 60 to 80 hours in front of computers for 25 years? I included my time thinking over ideas as work, reading books as work, congregation in cult as work. I even analyse strategic consequences of my friends relationship problems as logic and psychology exercises in work. It is really inhuman conditions because my mind has to run all the time to challenge itself without paycheck.

I see a big difference is most people thinking work/learning as slavery to the employers/teacher. So leisure time is classified as the time to avoid their work/learning. While you are working for yourself, everything you do in your life is work and learning.

But you are right that I don't care what the author said and have no intent to disprove what he wrote. I just enjoy my own way of living.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Four parts ridiculous, one part true.

1\. Young and inexperienced? _That's the point_. This is how you gain experience. Impressionable? Another word for "quick learners".

2\. Sacrificing happiness? Not if it feels good to work on something you believe in.

3\. Sacrificing creativity? Since when is it not creative to create a new business?

4\. "18 hour days for two straight months" -- from the point of view of "hard work," big deal. Good stress makes you stronger. You're alive all 18 hours anyway -- if you believe in what you are doing, and you take care of yourself along the way, then all that effort can actually _add_ to your energy levels.

5\. But the key line is "if you take care of yourself." The effects of sleep deprivation (and eating shit for food) are real. If think and act as though you're invincible, you really can burn out, and that is <a href="<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=69097>">a hellish experience.

</comment><comment><USER34> I guess maybe I'd be more concerned about this accusation if YC wasn't one of the smaller players in the space. Simply put, people will go and make bad and self-harming decisions all the time (god knows I've done it), it's a constant. If YC _is_ an unhealthy environment–and I see no evidence that it is, but perhaps the kool-aid is in my brain–then it's a relatively small one.

I mean, most people here realize they don't need ycomb, right? It's one of many ways to get some initial funding, but it's certainly not the only way or even the normal way. It's more of a publicity stunt for a new startup than a real viable path to large-scale funding (if funding is what you need).

<comment><USER2> _It's more of a publicity stunt for a new startup than a real viable path to large-scale funding_

Of the 80 startups prior to the current cycle (who haven't had Demo Day yet), I believe 14 have raised series A rounds so far. Probably the same number again could have if they wanted to, but either didn't want to raise that much money, or got acquired first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> He got at least one thing wrong: YC folks don't work hard to make money. Many of them work really hard, but I don't think it's to make money.

<comment><USER36> Pretty sure it's for the money.

<comment><USER13> I did it for the cheese. The Boston batch gets some pretty good stuff.

<comment><USER36> I would like to try podolico.

<comment><USER13> I've heard it's not worth the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> IMHO (based on my reading, and based on my observations of a certain organization where I went to college), the distinguishing feature of a cult is the exploitation of _unanimous peer pressure_ (cf. the Asch conformity experiment) to make everyone follow _one charismatic dictator_.

E.g. you give all your money to The Guru because that's what a loyal follower of The Guru does, and all the people you hang out with are loyal followers of The Guru. All the people you hang out with are loyal followers of The Guru because they love you so much and they have so many things for you to do together and go on all these lovely weekend retreats where you are told that if you hang out with someone who's not a loyal follower of The Guru then it would be very bad for your karma.

The unanimity and the single leadership make cults different in kind, and not just different in degree, from other kinds of organized goal-seeking human groups. And I really don't see how the cult model, seen in this way, applies to YC.

<comment><USER14> With over 22000 karma points, (~5000 more than nickb) you could construe that Paul Graham is the cult leader of this board, whereby his words are not just approved, they are also a guide.

If you start disagreeing with PG in a large way, those that like him will scrutinize you and take aim as they may feel they are also being questioned. So there is a slight cultish behaviour going on with this board and maybe with its larger YCombinator fund context, but not intently by PG, he's an investor for the most part.

YCombinator as a 'startup scene' is not a cult because no harm is being done, and the absorption of minds is for the most part very beneficial. Cult leaders, I think take advantage of their own charisma to defray free choice in their environment for their own benefit. All in all, Ycombinator has a culture but is not a cult.

The notion "build something people want" I think is an ideology and ideologies are at the foundations of many cults, but cults generally have spiritual or religious overtones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "5. They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and _their access to information is severely controlled_."

Yet on Hacker News, the recruiting grounds of said cult, this post (information contrary to the teaching of said cult) has ascended to the top?

</comment><comment><USER39> The solution is to apply the YC principles that fit for you and still live your life and to not get overly caught up in the message and let it block out outside reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER40> Speaking of the news.yc community and not of the founders, what if the perception of cultism keeps the quality of postings here from deteriorating rapidly? Most of the level-headed ones here do not buy into that percept and vote and comment independently and intelligently. The inevitable band of pg worshipers do amplify the noise, but could that be the cost of keeping the unaffiliated, median slashdotter away?

</comment><comment><USER41> The cylinder only fits in the circular hole.

You can't assume that you always have a cylinder or a cube to fit into the mold. Heck, you may end up with an icosidigon and have only a triangle to try to shove it into.

As amazing as the Y Combinator idea may sound to some, you also have to have a healthy sense of skepticism and apply it appropriately to every situation and oppourtunity that comes your way. Make it work for you, not you for it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Didn't yamada cover this ground about a year ago?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=51989>

</comment><comment><USER43> I am surely going to be a part of this cult.

</comment><comment><USER44> Linkbait, and not even original. People were calling pg a cult leader years ago.

<comment><USER45> I, for one, welcome our new YC overlords

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> As Jason said it elsewhere, "If U want to work 9 to 5, Go work for Starbucks"

</comment><comment><USER47> And several years ago the same thing was said about Schools.

<comment><USER48> With much more justification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> _I am opinionated, concerned about environmental issues ... surrounding software and data access._

We've got to stop dumping the used ones and zeros into the oceans! It's melting the ice caps!

<comment><USER19> "We've got to stop dumping the used ones and zeros into the oceans! It's melting the ice caps!"

Really, it's the ones. It's a well known fact ones have more energy than zeros. We should right now start dumping more zeros to cool down the oceans. If we do it quickly enough, we may stop global warming. We should also switch to other binary architectures as x86 code has a one-to-zero ratio that exceeds 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Isn't how much people hate you a sign that you're doing something different and right?

I'm certain I read that somewhere.

<comment><USER50> Be very careful about using that as a measuring stick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Olympians put in 18 hours a day - so they're cults too?

<http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/08summer/olympics.asp>

"...Talk of "magic" swimsuits obscures the incredibly hard work swimmers such as Russell, a second-year pharmacology major, actually put in. Before I went to university it would be 20 hours a week, weights and swimming. When I went to Indiana [his first school] my training stepped up to 30 hours of weights, swimming and dry land, though that is really excessive for me. Now it's about 18 hours..."

<comment><USER52> If you read closely, you'll find that's 18 hours a week.</comment></comment>


Visionaries - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/empire-state-of-mind/4385b13d7bb1

<comment><USER2> "The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things."

I thought that sentence seemed familiar.

<comment><USER3> paul graham? ha! caught in the act... lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "In search of the metaphorical startup booty" is an awesome sentence.</comment>